Ban Ki Moon will become the first UN Secretary-General to visit Antarctica when he makes an eco-trip there next month to highlight global warming.

He plans to take a small plane to the airstrip at Chile’s Eduardo Frei Montalva base on the Antarctic Fildes Peninsula in the company of Michelle Bachelet, the President of Chile, after attending the opening of the Ibero-American summit in Santiago on November 8, diplomats say.

The trip comes as Britain prepares to lodge a controversial claim at the UN to extend its Antarctic territory by a million square kilometres.

Britain plans to file the claim with the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf by a May 2009 deadline, but is almost certain to face overlapping claims from both Chile and Argentina. Jorge Taiana, the Argentine Foreign Minister, told reporters in Rome that his country’s claim would cover Antarctica as well as South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, over which the two countries were in conflict in 1982.

Mr Ban will try to avoid the brewing row over territorial claims in Antarctica to focus on global warming in the run-up to a key UN climate change conference in Bali in December, which will discuss new limits on greenhouse gas emissions when the Kyoto Protocol restrictions expire in 2012.

The former South Korean Foreign Minister has made climate change one of his signature issues since taking over as UN Secretary-General at the start of the year.

At last month’s UN General Assembly he hosted more than 80 world leaders, including US President George Bush, for a day of talks on the threat posed by rising temperatures.

He gave warning that climate change poses as great a threat to humanity as war, boosting Britain’s bid to place global warming on the UN Security Council’s agenda as a threat to peace and security.

Last week the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations set up in 1988 to study global warming, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President.

Mr Ban’s trip will allow him to meet face to face with scientists who study the effect of global warming on the polar ice cap. He may also visit other nations’ Antarctic bases while at the Chilean station, which lies only 200 yards from a Russian facility and close to South Korean, Argentine, Uruguayan and Czech Republic installations.

On his return to New York, the UN Secretary-General will also stop over in Brazil to venture into the Amazon rainforest to bring attention to the threat of deforestation.

While UN officials say Mr Ban will be the first UN Secretary-General to visit Antarctica, he is not the first senior official to do so. When Hans Blix was appointed as the chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq in 2000, he had to be summoned back from an Antarctic cruise with his wife.

On Monday Chile said that it will claim an extended portion of the Antarctic seabed to uphold its rights in the face of a similar step by Britain.Earlier treaties allowed countries to claim territory only 200 nautical miles (370km) from the coast.

Alejandro Foxley, the Foreign Minister, said that Chile was planning to file a similar claim to extend its Antarctic territory but expected that negotiations between countries with stakes in the region would follow.

“No one can affect the rights Chile has on Antarctic territory,” Mr Foxley said. Because of the 2009 deadline for filing a claim he said: “We have plenty of time.”

The other countries that have submitted claims to the UN commission are Russia, Brazil, Australia, the Irish Republic, New Zealand, France, Spain and Norway. The commission must rule on each application.

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